


Ten Years Before the Flood

by My_Barbaric_Yawp



Category: Grimm (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Family Feels, I don't know where this is going but I'm so excited to find out, It's a love story, Season/Series 01, Season/Series 02, Season/Series 03, also magic, it's always a love story, there's going to be lots of magic, we're going off-roading canonically speaking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-19 00:35:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 12,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29498913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/My_Barbaric_Yawp/pseuds/My_Barbaric_Yawp
Summary: She woges back and stares at him with her beautiful human face, bearing down against him, and he gasps, because yeah, she’s evil and yeah, she just tried to kill Hank with sex, but man, maybe it’d be worth it?***Nick and Adalind’s fight at the Bremen Ruins takes a swift, swift turn. An AU reimagining of a different start to the Schade-Burkhardt family.
Relationships: Nick Burkhardt/Adalind Schade, Rosalee Calvert/Monroe
Comments: 97
Kudos: 146





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Now that I’ve fully exorcised my many, many feelings about the canon version of Nick and Adalind getting together via my Long Way Home series, I’m turning my attention to dreaming up another way they could have gotten together earlier in the series. Well, I say another way. It’s the same way, just with different timing. Also, one of the ideas on my mood board is Catherine Schade and Kelly Burkhardt meeting Bud at Adalind’s baby shower. Things might get a little wild around here. Join me, won’t you?
> 
> Title from “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell.

“I think it’s time we settle our differences,” he says. “Violently.”

She woges then and rushes him—all silver moonlight in deadly motion—and he barely has time to brace before she’s on him, a storm of fists and magic that has him barely keeping pace, barely holding her back. They’re an equal match—all fire and ice—all burning fury—and when they finally land on the damp forest floor, it’s only luck and fate that land her squarely on top—straddling him and the startling hardness between them that he hadn’t even noticed in the fight for his life only moments before.

She woges back and stares at him with her beautiful human face, bearing down against him, and he gasps, because _yeah, she’s evil_ and _yeah, she just tried to kill Hank with sex_ , but _man, maybe it’d be worth it?_

“Fuck,” she says. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” And then she kisses him, and it’s not unlike the fight that came before—this heat between them that flares again and has them rolling—fighting to get to be on top—fighting to see whose pants can unzip first and how little they have to shimmy them down to finally find the heat they’re looking for—fingers licking at each other like flames, lips and tongues fighting the same old fight until finally—finally—he’s on top, and then he’s in her.

Later he’ll think there probably should have been a moment of surprise and reconsideration when he slid home into her heat, but they’re well beyond that now. There’s no rational thought to be had here between two mortal enemies fucking on the forest floor. It’s primal, this thing between them. It’s singing in their blood. The light calls to the dark, and the dark begs for it. A tale as old as time. And it’s anyone’s guess who’s the light at the moment.

“Oh god,” he says, clutching her hips to him while she rolls them and moves above him, glowing in the moonlight. “Oh god, please—”

She shuts him up with a kiss that bites and shorts him out. He might be bleeding, but he couldn’t care less, not when he’s coming apart in her arms while she shudders and keens in his.

“Well, fuck,” he says some time later, when his sight and his breath have returned. The moon is still full and shining above them, and the stars are still twinkling, and he’s got pine needles and mulch in his ass crack, and everything feels completely, irrevocably changed.

Adalind snorts and rolls over, nosing at his shoulder, still covered in practical green canvas. They’d barely stripped the necessary parts—he vaguely remembers ripping away lacy red panties?—and now he’s a little sad that he didn’t get to see more of her under that turtleneck. He’ll never have the chance again, what with the mortal enemies thing and Hank—

_Oh fuck, Hank._

He looks at her with panic, and she laughs again.

“Yeah,” she says, “we really did just do that. Guess we had a lot of tension to work out.”

There’s blood on her lips—his and hers, mixed—and as her tongue traces through the red there he realizes there’s blood on his lips, too—her blood—and the taste overwhelms him—vital salt and iron racing through his veins, burning him from the inside out.

She starts to shake then, and some primal part of him feels a bone deep satisfaction that she’s still quaking for him—still feeling the aftershocks of their rutting—but that quickly disappears when she starts to scream, and he realizes it's not aftershocks at all, it’s rigor mortis. She shakes and shakes and shakes until she’s horribly, deathly still, and then he sees her ghost—her hexenbiest face in white smoke, shrieking it’s way up into the night’s sky.

“Oh my god,” Adalind says, sobbing now. “Oh my god, you killed me. It’s gone. My powers, my purpose. I’m nothing now. Nothing!”

Nick doesn’t hesitate. He’s holding her before he even knows it—kissing her before the thought even comes. It’s not like the last time—all rushing blood and battle and power—it’s softer now. Sweeter.

“You’re not nothing,” he says, pulling away to wipe at the flood of tears running down her cheeks. “Not to me.”

Eventually, she stops crying. Not through any intervention of his but because tears are their own kind of magic, and it turns out Adalind had a lot of things to cry about.

“I’m so sorry,” she says. “I’m so sorry for everything.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I mean, we came here to kill each other, but I didn’t mean to do that. Not that way. Not when we were—”

“Oh god,” she says. “We were! I don’t know why I just had to bite you.”

Nick knows why—or senses it anyway. Something about blood and guts and raw, burning fire. Something primal and potent dammed up in both of them that needed to be let out with their incisors. Something that’s still lurking here between them, even after the flood.

“We should go,” Nick says. “I need to go see if Hank’s okay.”

“Oh god,” Adalind groans, covering her face with her hands. “I don’t think I can ever face Hank again.”

“Yeah, somehow I don’t think he’s going to be thrilled to see you.”

Adalind huffs out an aborted chuckle. “Yeah, I don’t think anyone is going to be happy to see me.”

“You’re coming with me then?”

“What else am I gonna do?” she says, sitting up and starting to button her jeans. “Go see my mother and Sean, I guess, but that can wait. It’s my apartment, anyway. Better go make sure Hank is alive.”

He stares at her while she picks rotted leaves out of her golden hair with a grunt of disgust, and she looks up at him with one raised eyebrow.

“What?”

“Just...you’re taking this really well. Maybe too well? I think I’m waiting for you to freak out more.”

“You and me both,” Adalind says, standing and wincing. “Afterglow is a hell of a drug, Nick. I think you broke me. Enjoy it while it lasts.”

***

They take separate cars back to her apartment, and once alone, Nick realizes he’s also feeling a little broken, all of a sudden. Nothing about his current situation seems real—the fight, the sex, the tears, the quiet acceptance of responsibility on Adalind’s part, and his own surprising willingness to let her come within twenty yards of Hank. She almost killed him three hours ago, and then she tried to kill Nick, and none of that seems to matter right now because they fucked in the woods and came away transformed.

Into what remains to be seen.

They park outside of her building and stand there together under a street lamp, heads bowed while they try to think of something to say.

“Does my hair look okay?” Adalind asks, and Nick laughs. Because no, it really doesn’t—it’s tangled and well-fucked and a little bit mulchy—but also he really doesn’t care. He’d love the chance to mess it up some more.

And that’s the precise moment when he remembers Juliette. His girlfriend. His dream girl. His everything.

“What?” Adalind asks, clearly catching the shock of horror on his face, and he feels like throwing up.

“I have a girlfriend,” he says.

“Oh,” Adalind says, “right.”

They stare at each other in the bright artificial light of the lamp, and then she starts to laugh. A deep, shaking belly laugh that hits him at the base of his spine and sends sparks upward, until he’s laughing, too. Not at Juliette, who deserves much, much better, but at the absolutely ridiculous chain of events that have brought him here to this moment with this woman in this space before they take the next plunge into the new mess that is their lives.

“So, Hank,” Adalind says finally, hiccupping a little after all that laughing. “Let’s go check on Hank.”

They head inside where they find Monroe and Rosalee waiting at the door. They both freeze when they see Adalind, hackles rising.

“Nick, is that who I think it is?” Monroe asks—growls really, although Nick can’t see the usual fangs that accompany that tone.

“You left Hank with a blutbad and a fuchsbau?” Adalind’s voice is rising in that way he’s starting to recognize as disbelief that he keeps surprising her.

“They’re my friends,” he says, “it’s cool, guys, she’s here to help. I think.”

“You think?” Rosalee asks. “Nick, what happened out there?”

“They had sex,” Monroe says, sniffing the air and tasting it like it’s leaving a bad taste in his mouth. “What the hell, Nick?”

“You had sex with Adalind?” This last comes from Hank, naked in the doorway of the bedroom, looking like he’s ready to punch Nick until he looks at Monroe and Rosalee and just...faints.

“Crap,” Monroe says, already moving to check Hank for a pulse or any further head trauma. “He must have seen us woge.”

“How?” Nick asks, feeling even more bewildered. “I didn’t even see you woge.”

Rosalee stops on her way to Monroe’s side and turns back to Nick.

“You didn’t see us woge?”

“No,” Nick says. “It must have been really quick.”

“Nick,” Adalind says—softly, gently—one hand in his somehow, stroking it in little soothing circles, “they’ve been woged since we got here.”

He nearly faints then, what with all the fighting and the blood loss and now this—the dawning loss of his Grimm-ness—his superpowers gone just like Adalind’s in a puff of proverbial smoke.


	2. Chapter 2

“This can’t be happening,” Nick says firmly, even while he sits on her couch and stares off into space with dead, glazed eyes that have nothing to do with his Grimm powers and everything to do with them going missing.

“Right,” Adalind says, squeezing his hand again. She has no idea how they ended up holding hands, but it’s happening now, and she’s committed. They’re both in shock, she knows. They’ve both lost the most powerful parts of themselves, and they did it together. That should bother her more, she’s sure. She should probably be able to blame him for everything right about now, but she was there. She knows what they did and why. Not the rational why—they may never know that—but the primal why had been clear. In that forest they had been equals—two killers in the night who met their match—and some biological, magical imperative had said _fuck yes_. Let’s do this. Let’s make the ultimate predator. Together.

Thank god she has an IUD. She shudders to think what evolution might have had in store if it had its way. If it mixed up the best and the worst of both of them and gave it human form. If it gave them a child on top of all the other nonsense they’ll have to deal with next.

“Adalind?”

She blinks up at the source of her name and finds the pretty little fuchsbau bending to meet her eyes.

“You are Adalind, right?” the fuchsbau asks. “You’re a hexenbiest?”

“Yeah,” Adalind says, and then on a sob: “No. I was a hexenbiest.”

“Oh. The blood—”

“Yeah.”

“Is that what took Nick’s powers, too?”

“No clue,” Adalind says, blinking away tears and finally registering that she’s home, in her apartment with total strangers. “Sorry, who are you?”

“Oh,” the fuchsbau says, “of course, sorry. I’m Rosalee, and that’s Monroe.” She gestures back towards the overgrown hipster currently maneuvering a now slightly more dressed Hank into a more comfortable position on the ground.

“Howdy,” Monroe says, snatching one of her throw pillows to support Hank’s head.

“We’re friends of Nick’s,” Rosalee says. “We help him with wesen stuff.”

Adalind blinks again. A Grimm with wesen friends? What the hell is going on in this town?

“We’re trying to figure out if it’s safe for us to all stay here tonight? I think it’s pretty clear that none of you should be alone right now, but do you think anyone else might try to find us here?”

“Mom,” Adalind says, “and Sean. We should go.”

“Okay,” Rosalee says. “You stay here and make sure Nick doesn’t move. We’ll go get the cars started.”

It doesn’t seem like Nick is at all likely to move. He’s still staring into space, holding Adalind’s hand like it’s his only tether to reality. Adalind gets that. She’s pretty sure holding on to him is the only reason she’s still upright.

Eventually Monroe and Rosalee come back. There are three cars to deal with—Nick’s, Hank’s, and Monroe’s, and it would be better if they left Sean and her mother as few clues as possible. Adalind agrees to drive Nick’s car, figuring if she totals it, it still won’t be the worst thing either of them has done to each other in the last twenty-four hours. He barely notices the change of locale as she guides him into the passenger seat—he stares out the window of the car the same way he was staring into the middle of her living room.

They have to break contact for her to close the door and get to the driver’s seat, and that does seem to shake him. It shakes them both, actually. It feels like there’s a sucking whirlpool opening up between them in the space where they should be touching—a vortex that threatens to drain the last of their energy reserves and drag them down to some unknown abyss.

“It’s okay,” she tells him, knowing that it’s not. She slides into the driver’s seat quickly and grabs his hand again in a rush. “I’m not going anywhere.”

He holds her hand the whole way to wherever Rosalee is leading them in Monroe’s car out in front. Monroe is bringing up the rear in Hank’s car, and Adalind is suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude for these two strangers who walked into a nightmare tonight and didn’t run away.

Their destination turns out to be a craftsman on the wooded outskirts of Portland.

“Where are we?” Adalind asks under her breath, not expecting a reply from Nick, but he surprises her with a sigh, shifting to peer out of her window at the cozy little place.

“Monroe’s house.”

“Cute,” Adalind says. “How are you feeling?”

“Better,” he says, “sort of. Less numb.”

“Good. Think you can make it from here to the house?”

He snorts and shakes his head. “I’ll try.”

They both open their doors, and then they realize they’re still holding hands.

“Count of three?”

“Sure,” he says. “One—”

“Two—”

“Three.” They say the last number together, and then they don’t release each other’s hands. Their fingers are laced together, holding tight and threatening to cut off circulation, but Adalind can’t make her fingers relax. Can’t bear to let him go.

“It feels like you’re keeping me going,” Nick says in a hushed tone. “Like your energy is propping me up. That’s not possible, right? We don’t have our powers any more.”

“I don’t know,” Adalind says. “Blood magic is old. Older-than-hexenbiests-as-a-species old. We evolved to be conductors of magical forces that were already present in the world. So my powers might be gone, but the magic between us and our shared blood? I don’t think that’s going anywhere.”

“Okay,” Nick says. “How do we get out of the car if we’re both propping each other up?”

Adalind sighs and unbuckles her seat belt.

“I guess that means I’m going over the top.”

“That’s what got us into this mess in the first place,” he says, huffing a laugh while she shifts and stretches one leg over his lap, and then she’s straddling him again, captured by his dark, grey eyes that whisper to her like a siren’s song.

“Nick?”

“Yeah?” He’s breathless, too. There’s not a lot of breathing going on in general right now.

She’s leaning down, and he’s reaching up, and their lips are about to touch again when Monroe pops up on Nick’s side of the car and squeals.

“Oh my god,” he says. “What the hell, guys?”

“Sorry,” Nick says. “We were trying to get out of the car.”

“Is that what we’re calling it these days?” Monroe asks, his whole forehead lifting with the force of his skepticism.

Adalind sighs and blows her hair out of her eyes. “We’re not calling it anything right now, but we can’t seem to let go of each other either, hence the awkward exit. Can you help pull me out?”

“Sure.” Monroe grabs her other hand and then freezes as though struck in the face.

“Monroe?”

Adalind drops his hand, and he shudders, looking pale.

“Whoa,” he says, “I just got a wallop of power off of you two. I don’t know what’s going on, but you guys are just pulsing with magic right now.”

“Yeah,” Adalind says, “I think we’re getting that. Take my arm please, don’t touch the skin.”

They extricate themselves from the car with Monroe’s assistance and hobble together towards the porch. Rosalee is at the open front door, watching their progress with a look of worry on her face.

“What’s going on? Were you okay in the car?”

“We’re fine,” Nick says, on autopilot, and Adalind rolls her eyes.

“We are not fine,” she says. “We’re magically linked by sex and blood, and I’m fresh out of hexenbiest mojo. We’re going to have to get some help tonight, because I don’t know about you, but I need to pee, and I’m guessing you’d like to talk to Juliette at some point without me practically in your lap.”

“Fine,” Nick says, closing his eyes and swaying into the support of her shoulder. “Fine, fine, fine.”

“Brandy,” Monroe says, reaching out from behind to help prop Nick up. “How about I get us all a big glass of brandy?”

They all end up in the living room—Hank sprawled out on the couch, fading in and out of consciousness, Rosalee in the chair with Monroe hovering over her shoulder, and Nick stretched out on the floor, still holding Adalind’s hand while she’s propped up against the wall, next to the fireplace.

Adalind gulps her brandy and considers her options. Somehow she can’t think her mother would be too willing to help in the current circumstances, but they are going to need to talk to another hexenbiest tonight. It’s a risky move—she knows just how much she can trust her former colleagues now that she’s not one of them, and it’s significantly less than she trusts the man who was actively trying to kill her two hours ago.

“I have to make a call,” she tells the group. “We need help. Hexenbiest help.”

“Your mom?” Rosalee asks.

“Absolutely not,” Adalind says. “She’s working with Sean, and neither of them are going to forget about the key anytime soon.”

“Oh god,” Monroe says, “remember the key?”

“I’m trying not to,” Adalind says, fishing out her phone and trying to remember the number her aunt made her memorize years ago. The number for the only other hexenbiest on the ground in Portland who could have helped during her mother’s rough patch in high school. “And let’s not speak of it again until the hexenbiest I’m calling has come and gone. If you know where it is, forget it. You never know what a hexenbiest can pick up from a room.”

“Great,” Nick says, sounding strangled. “And just who exactly are you calling?”

Adalind finally remembers the last digit and grins down at him, triumphant.

“I’m calling the only other head-bitch in town.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for the great response so far! It's really exciting that people are interested in where this is going.

The minute Nick sees Henrietta, he knows they must be in worse trouble than he thought. He isn’t able to see her woge, but he doesn’t need to for this. She radiates power and control and calm. She feels like a force of nature, and she probably is. What had Adalind said? Hexenbiests are conductors of the earth’s natural magic? Henrietta is a lightning rod in reverse—crackling with energy that feels surprisingly grounded and all the scarier for it.

He’s only just realizing that Adalind is actually quite young in terms of hexenbiest lifespan, and that thought is terrifying. Her powers were more than enough of a challenge for him—a match for his own—but Henrietta walks with the surety of centuries behind her, and he knows in his bones that her power is orders of magnitude greater than Adalind’s just by sheer dint of experience.

“What have we here?”

Henrietta peers down at them with a little quirk of a smile, her eyes clearly seeing far more than two beat up, exhausted people sacked out on Monroe’s living room floor.

“How very curious,” she says. “A Grimm and a hexenbiest—joined and destroyed and reborn—all at the same time.”

“Is that what happened?” Adalind asks, but Henrietta shushes her and starts scanning them with her hands, floating her palms over their bodies an inch from the surface, pausing briefly to mutter something under her breath before moving onwards again.

Eventually, Henrietta sits back and turns to look at Hank, who’s muttering something about cookies and canines in his sleep.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Love spell,” Adalind says. “It didn’t end well.”

Henrietta turns back to her with narrowed eyes, and Nick feels a little of the chill that passes through Adalind at the clear reproval there. Then Henrietta turns her gaze to Rosalee.

“You are the lady of this house?”

“Me?” Rosalee blanches and looks to Monroe, the two of them caught by the shock and fearful hope in each other’s eyes.

“No,” she says quietly. “No, I’m not.”

“You will be,” Henrietta says, brushing past the awkward tension in the room with the air of a woman who’s been watching mortals cavort for ages and is beyond such petty human concerns as timing and chemistry and luck. “Your friend needs a restorative potion—something to clear out the love spell and help settle his mind.”

“Oh,” Rosalee says, “we’ll have to go to the shop for supplies.”

“Tea should suffice. Bring me the pot when it’s brewed.”

“Should we—you know—think about a memory spell, too?” Monroe asks. “Hank saw us woge. That can’t be good.”

Henrietta shakes her head sharply. “His connection to reality is already precarious. If you throw one more spell his way, it will be lost forever. That love spell was really quite nasty, you know.” She’s talking to Adalind now. “Your mother must be very proud.”

“You don’t know my mother,” Adalind says, under her breath so only Nick can hear it. Well, Nick and Henrietta, who seems to be listening very hard for something.

“I know her too well,” Henrietta says. “Her brand of magic is not for you, little witch. You have another path to tread.”

“What path?” Adalind asks. “What’s happening to me? To us?”

Henrietta smiles, and Nick finds himself thinking of the Sphinx and the Nile and an impending flood.

“You’re growing,” Henrietta says. “Both of you. You’re growing a brand new life.”

***

“So just to be clear,” Monroe says for the third time, “we’re talking a life-life, right? A baby? They’re not going to run off to Vegas and join the circus and take new names, right? That’s not what you meant by a new life?”

“No,” Henrietta says, still smirking that Sphinx smile of hers, “and yes.”

"Well, that's clear."

"A new life means making a choice. To go down one path, another must be abandoned, and you cannot go back the way you came. All possibilities are open now—in this moment. The choice is yet to be made."

“Great,” Monroe says. “That’s just great.”

It’s a little odd, Nick thinks in a distant kind of way. A little odd that Monroe seems to care a lot more about nailing down the answers to these nagging questions than the potential parents to be. Nick supposes that he and Adalind are both still in shock. In the space of an evening they’ve gone from mortal enemies, to lovers, to the only two people in the world who might understand the depth of their grief in the face of the loss of an essential part of themselves, to finding out they might be parents in the not too distant future.

So really, it’s not odd that Monroe has more energy than they do when it comes to nailing down the particulars of this final revelation. It’s more odd that they have any energy at all, frankly.

And it’s also odd that in some bizarre way, Nick’s not all that surprised by this new turn of events. It’s almost a comfort to realize that there might be some larger plan at work—some primal force that drove them together on that forest floor with the express purpose of creating something powerful and new. It’s better than the alternative, which is that two grown adults sworn to destroy each other touched their bathing suit parts together by accident and just couldn’t help themselves. That’s a level of whoopies he can’t handle right now, so predestined magic baby is suddenly sounding completely fine. Not great, but absolutely better than the alternative.

“Tea’s ready,” Rosalee says, entering with the teapot. Henrietta waves her over and stills with her hands over the lid. They all sit in silence for a time, aware that whatever is going on between Henrietta and the teapot is almost certainly much more complicated than it looks.

“It’s done,” Henrietta says. “Make sure he drinks it all—slowly—over the next hour. Don’t tell him anything until it’s done. He needs to find his feet in his own mind, and anything you share with him before he does might cripple his recovery. Take him to another room for quiet, while I tend to these two.”

Rosalee disappears again while Monroe helps Hank shuffle to the other side of the house for tea and mind quarantine.

“Now,” Henrietta says, “what are we going to do with the two of you?”

It’s clearly a rhetorical question, but Adalind is a lawyer—something that Nick is viscerally reminded of when she leans in and asks, “What’s the loophole?”

“Excuse me?”

“Come on,” Adalind says, “there’s got to be a way out of this. A way to ditch the baby and get our powers back and go back to life as normal, all happy mortal enemies again. There has to be, right?”

“Does there?”

“Yes!” Adalind shouts, loud enough for Rosalee to pop back in from where Hank needs silence and glare.

“Sorry,” Adalind says, wincing. “But what’s the point of magic if you can’t fix things that obviously shouldn’t be happening? I can’t have a baby right now. And Nick and I barely know each other—just two killer ships in the night, really—so there has to be a way out of this. There just has to be.”

There’s silence then after Adalind’s little speech, and Nick thinks about how nice that all sounds and how completely unlikely. He doesn’t know a lot about magic, admittedly, but he’s pretty sure you don’t get do-overs on things like technicalities and unclear intentions. In fact, he’s pretty sure magic thrives on making the most out of those things. Nature always finds a way, and human fuckups must be it’s preferred medium.

“So sure that this is not your path,” Henrietta says. “So sure the way forward is meant to be paved with death. This is not your way, Adalind Schade. Your way will be forged in life and in love and yes, dearheart, in magic beyond measure. This is not the end, little witch. This is just your beginning.”

“Oh,” Adalind says, sounding very young all of a sudden, and Nick squeezes her hand a little to give her what strength he can spare. She grips his hand just as tightly, sending it back—a little circuit of energy that sustains them both in this increasingly unsustainable world.

“And you?” Henrietta asks next, turning her eyes down to Nick. “What say you, Grimm?”

“I’m not a Grimm,” Nick says. “Not anymore.”

“No?”

“No. This thing—what happened up there between us—it took my powers. I can’t see wesen at all now—probably can’t fight the way I used to either. It’s all over for me.”

“Ah, yes,” Henrietta says. “You lost your weapons in the fight, and now you lay here ready to die. Is that it? Not superhuman anymore, so forget about protecting the world, you’ll just let it burn?”

“What? No,” Nick says, “I’m still a cop. I’ve still got a job to do.”

“And being a Grimm is not a job?”

“Is it?” Nick asks, genuinely puzzled. “I thought it was just who I was.”

“Your friends in the other room—the blutbad and the fuchsbau. Do their other faces come with a calling and a mission?”

“No?”

“Then perhaps being a Grimm is more of a vocation. One you chose just as much as it chose you.”

“Oh,” Nick says, thinking about the first time he saw the inside of Aunt Marie’s trailer. The first time he hefted the great axe that he’d found there. How its touch had electrified him—made him feel like a live wire in his worn out skin.

The truth is he’d been bored before. Before he saw Adalind’s face outside of that jewelry store, he’d been stuck in a rut, staring down the barrel of fifty more years on the force where the work was crucial but the mystery was long since dead. In some dark little part of his mind he worries that was why he’d bought the ring that day. That he’d decided to change something just for the relief of it—even if it was just his marital status.

And then there was Adalind. Beautiful and terrifying and yes, dammit, mysterious—and suddenly fifty more years of hunting bad guys—actually hunting them like the predator he was born to be—well, suddenly, it didn’t seem so bad.

“So,” Henrietta says, “you both have choices. Life and death. Power and responsibility, or their abdication. This baby isn’t made yet, but the first choice has been. Tonight you merely cleared the way for it. Made a space for it to take root. The blood you share now—that’s what makes this all so possible. It’s stripped you bare of all your defenses—your magic, your power, your differences. You are one now, and you can create another more powerful than you both. You can create a life that will transform the world.”

Nick finds himself looking to Adalind, just as she looks to him. Their eyes catch and they hold, tethered here together on the edge of a destiny that stretches out before them like a forest—wild and unknown.

“Or you can not,” Henrietta says calmly. “You can lay down your arms and return to your fields and forget all about the time when you once strove with gods. It’s entirely up to you.”


	4. Chapter 4

“So you’re saying that your options are to sleep with each other again, make a baby, and get your powers back, or to go your separate ways, live a normal Kehrseite life, and try to forget everything you’ve ever known about the wesen world?”

 _It’s a good summation_ , Adalind thinks from where she’s slumped on the couch, leaning her head on Nick’s shoulder. Monroe’s summation powers are top notch. Too bad he can’t use those powers to fix any of the options he just summed up, but hey, he gets points for clarity.

“Pretty much,” Nick says, sipping at his brandy now that he’s finally able to sit upright under his own power. “Henrietta hooked us up with these charms for two weeks. Should help us stay connected and upright while we figure out what to do next.”

He holds out his new necklace to Monroe, who leans in with a critical eye to inspect the intricate triple spiral of metal holding a glowing red stone.

“I gotta tell you, that is some nifty metalwork,” Monroe says.

“It’s a set.” Nick gestures to Adalind, who dutifully holds hers out for a similar examination.

“Wow,” Monroe says, “what’s the stone? I’ve never seen a ruby glow like that before.”

Nick turns to her with a raised eyebrow, and she sighs. Hexenbiest weirdness is her specialty subject, after all.

“It’s blood,” she says. “Our blood, all mixed together and frozen at the same vibration. It’ll keep us on an even keel for the next two weeks until we decide what steps to take. If we decide to part ways, Henrietta can help untangle us and send us out into the world without anything connecting us to our old lives.”

“And if we don’t decide to part ways, she’ll let us keep the charms until the baby comes and our powers are restored,” Nick says, like he’s talking about an incoming cold front rather than an honest-to-god baby.

“Two weeks isn’t a lot of time,” Monroe says, and Adalind could not agree more. But Henrietta had been clear—their window of opportunity to finish what they’d inadvertently started was already closing, and it would be gone altogether by the time the moon went dark two weeks from tonight.

“No,” Nick says, “it isn’t. But we don’t have a choice. We can’t go back to the way things were either way.”

“That sucks,” Adalind says. “Although mind you, working for Sean Renard wasn’t exactly working out.”

“What?” Nick sits up so fast that Adalind is knocked out of her spot cuddled into his side. When he turns to her, his eyes are huge. “You’re working for my Captain?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” Adalind says. “He’s really obsessed with that fucking key.”

“The Captain. My Captain? Does he know what you were doing to Hank?”

Adalind snorts. “He made me do that to Hank. No offence to Hank, but he’s way too nice to be my type. Sean put me up to it to get to you.”

“Jesus,” Nick says, “what does he have on you?”

“Nothing.” She sinks further back into the couch, away from his searching eyes that want to believe she was forced to hurt Hank rather than just willing to do it for the right man. “Sean is my type, and my mother always wanted me to marry a prince, and it just seemed like what I needed to do to be with him, you know?”

“You slept with my Captain?” Nick asks, the question bursting out of him in a way that makes Adalind sit up again, ready to fight.

“That’s what you got from that? Yeah, I slept with Sean. I slept with Hank. I slept with you. It’s a fucking Portland PD trifecta, and let me tell you, it’s been lousy.”

“Lousy?!” Nick looks nearly apoplectic, but Monroe cuts in with a well-timed query.

“The Captain’s a Royal prince?”

Adalind turns to him with a grateful smile. Monroe really is a gem.

“Yes, he is, Monroe. Thank you for noticing the important part of the story here.”

“Listen,” Nick says, “STIs are also important—”

“Yes, Nick. Of course, I’m unclean, how thoughtless of me—let’s round up Sean and Hank and Juliette and all go get tested. I’m sure that will go down really, really well.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Yes, you did. You think just because I use my body to get what I want that I’m unsafe. Well, for the record, I’ve had all sorts of protection—magical and mundane—and regular testing, and you are the only man I’ve ever met who didn’t think to ask about a goddamn condom.”

Monroe coughs then, awkwardly, and Nick blushes red hot.

“I don’t think either of us were thinking much about that.”

“Exactly,” Adalind says. “So what the hell are we fighting about? So I slept with your boss. That doesn’t make you special. I’ve slept with plenty of people’s bosses. Hell, I’ve slept with my boss. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Nick stares at her—his eyes gone dark and dull again.

“I guess maybe it meant something to me,” he says.

***

Adalind finds Nick on the porch once she’s had a chance to calm down. He’d stormed out after those last cutting words, leaving her blinking at Monroe who looked just as stunned as she felt.

“It meant something to him?” she’d asked Monroe, and he’d shrugged—more of a flail really—and went back to Rosalee, who was still nursing Hank back to sanity in the other room.

Now she’s on the porch, and the damp, cool April night air makes everything seem just a little less inflammatory. They’ve been on fire since the forest, but the coming rain makes her remember that fires can’t burn red hot forever. Not without consequences. Finding balance in this situation is going to be everything

“What did you mean?” Adalind says quietly, coming to rest at Nick’s side, looking out over the shadowy yard and the woods stretching deep on the other side of the road. “It meant something to you?”

“I don’t know,” Nick says, eyes flicking over her face and away again. “I don’t know why, but being with you—what happened up there at the ruins—it felt real, you know? It felt like we really connected in some deep, primal way. And if you didn’t feel that—if that was just in my head—I don’t know…”

He trails off, and they both just stand there with the echo of that thought—that connection—vibrating between them. He’s not wrong. Adalind knows what he means. Sex has always been pretty utilitarian for her, but being with Nick—that was something else entirely. Primal, like he said, and raw and powerful. The way they fit together—the way they moved—it was like a dance they knew all the moves to, even without hearing the music. A dance they were born to do together—that they might never do again if they take the second option and go their separate ways.

“You have a girlfriend, Nick,” she says.

“I know,” he says. “I know.”

“I know you love her.” The thought sort of turns her stomach. “I know you’re not going to leave her just because some freak magical accident made you fall dick-first into a hexenbiest.”

“Right. You’re right.”

“So just where exactly do you get off being jealous and righteous about my past partners?”

“I don’t. I know I have no claim on your past.”

“Damn straight,” she says.

“Yeah.” He’s still looking away, into the dark. “I guess maybe I’m slightly more invested in your future. In our future. Together.”

Adalind stares at him—the most frustrating man in the world and also the most interesting—staring pointedly at anything but her.

“You want to have a baby with me?”

He sighs and shrugs. “I don’t know. I do know that I liked being a Grimm. I liked seeing the world in a new way—I liked protecting it and feeling like I had a purpose. What did Henrietta call it? A vocation. I think I’m really going to miss having a vocation.”

“I get that,” Adalind says. “Being a witch—it’s like that. A calling you can’t ignore. Something so deeply tangled up with who you are that losing it feels like a death, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Nick says. “And I know I could go home to Juliette. Ask Henrietta to untangle us and send us on our merry way. Juliette and I could leave—start a new life somewhere else. Get married, start a family, work 9 to 5 until we retire, and then garden until we die.”

“Sounds nice,” Adalind says. “I mean, not for me, but if the American dream is your cup of tea, that sounds just about perfect.”

“Yeah,” Nick says, turning finally to meet her eyes. His are bright now in the moonlight. Awake. Alive. Not looking away. “Only, I don’t think it is my cup of tea. I mean, I love Juliette, but the rest of it sounds boring as shit.”

“There is that,” Adalind says, smiling up at him. It’s so easy sometimes.

“So, I think I want to be a Grimm again. And I guess that means I might want to have a baby with you.”

And then...then it’s hard.

“I don’t think that’s a great reason to have a kid, Nick,” she says, sighing and looking away. “I’ve seen what happens when people have kids because they really want something else. The something else turns out to be not what they thought it was, and then there’s this kid, all sentient and existing and inevitably very, very hurt. My dad left when I was four, and my mom never got over it. She never let me get over it, either. I’m not going to do that to my children. Not on purpose. Not even to get my powers back.”

It’s quiet then for a while afterwards. There’s an owl hooting softly in the woods and the rustle of small, fuzzy things in the bushes. Rabbits probably. It's that season again. The wild things are making babies and getting on with the work of living.

“You’re right,” he says finally, pulling her into a one-arm hug, dropping an unexpected but welcome kiss into her still tangled hair. “If we decide to make a baby, we’re going to be responsible for that baby for the rest of our lives. We should be committed to that, if we’re going to do it.”

“Yeah.” She leans into him, feeling held and supported and safe for the first time in a very long time. She takes a minute to savor that—to file it away in her memory—so that when this all goes tits up she has something lovely to hold on to.

“Nick—what are we going to do?”

“I have no idea,” he says, thumb stroking warmth and strength into her shoulder. “I guess we’ll have to figure that out.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you everyone for all your lovely kudos and comments. It's very exciting to me that folks are excited about where this story is going. This is one of the first times I've gone this AU, and I have to tell you, it's been a wild ride so far. Thank you for coming with!

“Hank, look at me.”

Hank does not look at Nick. Hank is very, very angry, and he only has eyes for Adalind.

“What the hell did you do to me?”

“A love spell,” Adalind says. “I’m sorry Hank.”

“Sorry doesn’t cut it,” Hank says. “I feel used and violated, and I don’t even know what’s real anymore. I still don’t know if I believe in magic! What am I going to do with all of this—this—in my head?”

“I don’t know.” She holds her ground and meets his eyes, letting the discomfort settle—acknowledging it—holding it for him so that he doesn’t have to carry it all himself. “Henrietta said a memory spell is out of the question, so you’re going to have a lot to process for a while. I can answer any questions you have while you do that, but otherwise, I’ll steer clear, okay? After tonight, you don’t have to see me again unless you feel comfortable.”

She’s so calm that Nick is starting to wonder where the woman who taunted him for months has disappeared to. She must still be in there—he knows that—but now he’s meeting another side of Adalind—the lawyer, the mediator, the survivor. There’s no way that the woman he’s seeing now only slept her way to the top. Her body may be a weapon for her—just like her magic and her sarcasm—but underneath it all, she might just be the most natural negotiator he’s ever met.

“I know it’s also going to be a little weird for you and Nick going forward,” she adds, and Nick nods. Weird is just the tip of this iceberg.

“Weird doesn’t even begin to cover it,” Hank says, finally turning to look at Nick. “You had sex with her, man—while I was dying because she tried to kill me. What kind of a partner does that?”

“I don’t know, Hank,” Nick says. “I could say it was magic, but who knows. I’m sorry, too.”

“We’re partners Nick—we’re supposed to protect each other. We’re supposed to trust each other. How can I trust you when you’ve not only been hiding this whole secret life, but now that life almost got me killed!”

“Not having a partner in the know also could have gotten you killed,” Monroe says. He and Rosalee are drinking red wine on the couch, watching the drama unfold in front of them.

“And you—” Hank says, “what even are you?”

“Blutbat,” Monroe says. “Werewolves give us a bad name. Rosalee’s a fuchsbau—a total fox. And you’re lucky that we’re friends with Nick and that he turned out to be a Grimm, because the number of times you two have almost been killed by a rogue wesen since I met you tells me that you were on track to get yourselves murdered in this town without the proper resources.”

“You are sort of a bad wesen magnet,” Rosalee says to Nick. “Although that’s probably just the Grimm thing. There’s a reason most Grimms move around a lot. Staying in one place tends to invite confrontation.”

“Great,” Nick says.

“Fucking fantastic,” Hank says. “My partner’s a magnet for death, and he doesn’t even have the complementary superpowers anymore thanks to little miss love spell over here.”

“Yeah, that is going to be a problem, Nick,” Monroe says. “I mean even if you and Adalind do go the baby route, it’s still going to be nine months before you’re back in action, and that’s going to create a power vacuum.”

“Fun,” Adalind says. “Love a power vacuum. So many opportunities.”

“Not if your baby daddy ends up dead, it’s not.”

“Right.” Adalind looks thoughtful for a moment, then she starts plotting. “We’re going to need some hefty alliances, Nick. Sean’s our best bet. It’s icky, but he is a prince, and that does mean something. We definitely need a hexenbiest to keep us off the map. Maybe my mother, maybe Henrietta. If we could get another Grimm on side, that could be huge. Maybe the Resistance could hook us up? They know all the best rogue agents, and they might go for you in a big way now that they know you’re not inclined to work for the Royals. Add in Monroe and Rosalee, and we should be safe enough. It’s only nine months. I’ve survived coups longer than that.”

Everyone stares at Adalind in silence for a moment. Nick’s mind is buzzing—absorbing the plan, assessing the plan, admiring the plan and how quickly she developed it, but also freaking out about the plan because it’s starting to sound like they really might be having a baby in nine months, and he’s not at all sure if he’s ready for that to be real yet.

“Wait,” Hank says, pinching the bridge of his nose like he has a headache coming on. “What’s this about a baby? Are you two having a baby? When did this happen? Does Juliette know?”

“No,” Nick says. “It just happened. Or maybe just the start of it happened. Apparently us having sex tonight was the opening act for us making a baby in the next two weeks. We make the baby, we get our powers back when it’s born. We don’t make the baby, we go back to being ordinary citizens.”

“Speak for yourself,” Adalind says. “I don’t do ordinary.”

Nick rolls his eyes. “You also don’t do magic anymore, Adalind. That’s the whole point.”

“Why?” Hank asks, and everyone looks at him. _It’s a great question_ , Nick thinks. Why is any of this happening right now? Why him? Why her? Why them?

“I don’t know,” Nick says. “Something out there thought we were the right parents for the job, I guess.”

“What job?”

“Making a kid who’s going to change the world,” Nick says. “For the better hopefully, although how is anyone’s guess.”

“Well, fuck,” Hank says.

“That’s what I said.”

***

It’s not that everything is fine with Hank now. Hank’s survived a lot of upsetting experiences tonight—they all have—and he’s not going to be fine any time soon. But he has reached a new plateau of understanding about what happened, and he’s no longer blaming Nick for the act of nature—or magic or fate—that brought him and Adalind together tonight.

“I’m not even going to pretend to understand this,” Hank says to both of them on his way up to Monroe’s guest bed. “Good luck, I guess, and please don’t hex me again.”

“I’ll try not to,” Adalind says—being more truthful than strictly necessary—and Nick glares at her. For a lawyer, you’d think she’d be better at telling little white lies.

“I know you meant that to be reassuring,” Hank says, “but your bedside manner sucks.”

“I’m not trying to be reassuring,” Adalind says. “I’m trying to be truthful. I will never lie to you again, Hank, and that is a promise. I don’t give it lightly.”

There’s something that passes between them then—some shared understanding that Nick may never be a part of. He’s amazed when Hank nods, more at peace now than even a minute ago, and turns to head up the stairs.

“All right then,” he says, and then he’s gone, and Nick is left alone with Adalind.

“You were good with him,” Nick says. “Really good, actually. How did you know how to do that?”

Adalind’s smile is more of a grimace. “Experience,” she says. “Magic like that—it can break you. Make you question everything. It’s my mom’s specialty. That’s why Sean came to me for it—I learned from the best. But Henrietta’s right, it’s not my kind of magic. Trickery and confusion, yes—that’s part of the fun, and it serves a purpose—but total mind control and manipulation? That can get dark pretty damn fast. I’d so much rather just fight and get it over with.”

“Me, too,” Nick says. “Point me at a head to cut off, and I’m happy.”

She laughs, and he grins, pleased to see the tension sink back out of her shoulders. It always seems to creep in whenever they talk about her mom.

“I don’t know about you, but it feels like this night started weeks ago,” he says. “I’m going to bed. I’ll take the floor, you can have the couch.”

“Good,” Adalind says, passing him with a yawn. “I was going to take it anyway.”

***

He dreams of the forest by the ruins. There’s snow on the ground—a soft, white blanket that covers the earth where they met and fought and fucked only hours before. There are icicles in the evergreens that glow and melt in the sun filtering down through the trees.

There’s a little girl in the snow—bundled up in a hat and surprisingly sweet little mittens in a way that makes something inside him clench with fondness. She’s all long blonde hair and sharp blue eyes and deep, deep dimples while she grins up at the sun, glowing herself in its soft, persistent beam.

The longer he looks, the less sure he is that the light comes from above. The girl looks like she’s glowing from the inside—shining bright enough to melt the snow and reawaken the earth. His little girl is jumpstarting spring.

The light dims slowly. The snow is gone and the air is wet and warm—ready for new life—and she turns to him with wide blue eyes and that broad dimpled grin.

“Where’s mommy?” she asks, and he looks for her. For Adalind. He knows that’s who mommy is.

“I don’t know, kiddo,” he says. He’s trying to find her, but the edges of this little clearing are vague and dim, and many eyes stir in the dark. “I don’t know how to find her.”

“You have to,” the girl says. “I need you both.”

She’s not smiling now—not pleased—and where once her glowing light was the warmth of the sun, now it’s the flame of a wildfire, threatening to consume the forest in all its new found rage. Her eyes are violet—bright, burning purple flames licking at her eyelids, consuming her dimpled face, her long blonde hair, her little mittened hands.

“I want my mommy,” she says—a terrible echo of her sweet little voice—and Nick has never been more afraid.

***

The next morning is subdued at the breakfast table. Everyone is nursing a cup of Monroe’s meticulously brewed coffee and trying not to meet each other’s eyes. Rosalee is missing, having finally left for her own bed last night, and that leaves the rest of them groping for topics of polite conversation that don’t involve magic or fate or difficult decisions looming in the very near future.

Finally, Nick gives up with a sigh.

“I have to go home,” he says. “God knows what I’m going to tell Juliette.”

“The truth?” Hank offers.

“I can woge for her if it helps,” Monroe says.

“Thanks,” Nick says. “Maybe we should wait though, until I know what the plan is. If my powers aren’t coming back, maybe she never needs to know.”

Adalind snorts and mutters into her coffee. “Making life changing decisions for her without her consent, huh? Kinky.”

It's becoming clear to Nick that Adalind is not a morning person. After a restless night, he woke up this morning to his phone whacking him in the face. He’d left it on the table next to her last night, and Adalind hadn’t appreciated his early alarm.

“What do you want me to do?” he asks. “Tell her I cheated on her but it’s okay, the forest made me do it? Also I might need to do it again, and oh, by the way, how do you feel about co-parenting a magic baby in about nine months? I know it’s not the engagement ring you were expecting, honey, but surprise, I’m going to be a dad.”

“Yeah,” Monroe says, “don’t use any of that.”

“I won’t. It’s just not easy to know what to tell her today—not when we still have two weeks left to figure this out.”

“I don’t know that there is anything to figure out,” Adalind says. “Either we make this baby, or we don’t. Everything else is ancillary.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Nick says. “We should probably figure out if we can stand not killing each other for the next eighteen years. That seems pretty crucial to me.”

Adalind laughs at that—bright and shining in the clear light of day—all too familiar dimples flashing in the sunlight—and Nick thinks that those eighteen years might seem a little bit more doable, all of a sudden.

“How do you propose we do that?” Adalind asks. “Are we going to co-parent date for two weeks? Get a fake baby to practice on? What metrics would you like to employ, Nick? On what rubrics should we be judged?”

She’s being facetious—he knows that—but she’s not wrong. They really do need to spend time together to know if this is going to work.

“I guess, yes,” he says. “Maybe we should date. Not romantically, or anything, but how else are we going to get to know each other in two weeks?”

Adalind blinks at him and he grins. It turns out that taking her seriously is the fastest way to get past her sarcastic defenses, and it’s fun, to be able to surprise her like that.

“I like expensive dinners and couture shopping,” she says.

“How about I buy you a cup of coffee instead?”


	6. Chapter 6

Adalind spends the morning trying to find her balance after last night’s dream encounter with a very cranky little girl, and she’s only been moderately successful before Nick surprises her with the offer of a date and a ride home, not necessarily in that order. He drives this time, and they’re not holding hands, but she catches herself thinking that the silence between them was easier last night. They’d been cocooned by shock—clutching each other out of necessity—and even though they didn’t have much to say to each other on the ride, they’d been there together, sharing the space.

Now it feels like they can’t get out of each other’s way fast enough. They’re remembering everything that went before—her taunting, his threats, their shared history of violence and distrust. They’d been in a bubble last night—two people whose lives were changed in one shared instant—but now they have to go back to their separate lives and make sense of those changes. He’s going home to Juliette, and she’s going home to a mess—the apartment where she slept with Hank and the lurking specter of her mother and Sean and the key she doesn’t have.

As it turns out, that specter is not even lurking anymore by the time she gets home. Sean is on the sidewalk in front of her building—arms crossed, foot tapping—waiting for her to arrive like a disapproving school marm, and she sighs as Nick pulls up to the curb and Sean’s glare only intensifies.

“Oh, man,” Nick says.

“I’ll handle it.”

Nick snorts. “Yeah, no. The last time you ‘handled’ Renard, Hank almost wound up dead. And he is my Captain. Whatever happens here, I have to deal with it at work later anyway.”

Adalind can feel her teeth clench and grind. Nick will never understand her calculus around Hank. Sean could have just as easily set his sights on Juliette, and while Adalind wasn’t exactly wild about Juliette’s pretty, pretty princess routine when they met last week, at least Hank was an actual combatant on the board. All’s fair in love and war, but she let Sean pick Hank because he was already a player. A fighter in his own right. And yeah, she was always going to win, but that’s the game. Witches vs. warriors. Sometimes the witch burns and sometimes the warrior burns in her, but it’s an age old fight and someone’s always going to lose. There’s no shame in the game.

But Nick doesn’t play that game. He doesn’t want to burn or be burned. He just wants justice. He wants a world built on trust and mutual respect and peace, of all things, and that makes her teeth itch, because the world she was born into doesn’t work like that, but it would be so much better if it did.

“Fine,” she says through her teeth, stepping out of the car and slamming the door behind her.

Sean is there immediately, staring her down.

“What is he doing here?”

“Bringing her home,” Nick says, coming up behind her to place a hand on the small of her back. “We had a long night.”

Adalind closes her eyes and counts to ten. Just because Nick wants peace in the wesen world doesn’t mean he’s opposed to starting a few little personal conflicts of his own, and it’s just her luck that his chosen target is the only Royal worth striking a bargain with for 5,000 miles.

When she opens her eyes she’s treated to the incredibly rare sight of Sean Renard speechless, and all of a sudden she’s feeling much more fondly towards Nick, who’s hand really is lovely and warm where it slides between the edges of her jacket and jeans.

“A lot’s changed, Sean,” she says. “The key is the least of our problems. Talk to Henrietta, and then we can talk. We can’t fight you, but hurting us right now might destroy the world, so consider that something like a nuclear deterrent for the time being.”

Sean stills and his eyes zero in on her face.

“You’ve lost your powers,” he says. “You’re useless to me.”

Behind her Nick stirs, and Adalind stretches out a hand to hold him back before he can punch Sean and get them both killed.

“You suck as a boyfriend, Sean,” she says. "I would have followed you anywhere. You know that, right? I was raised to follow you. To love you. All the way to Vienna. But you never wanted me to get that far—you never wanted me much at all. And I don't want you, now, either, so let’s call it quits and figure out how to be allies in this town, because I may not have my powers now, but once I do, you really won’t want to be my enemy."

Sean stares at her, and then beyond her to Nick, who meets his stare with a glare of his own.

“What she said,” Nick says, “without the boyfriend part. Although I heard the sex was lousy, so good luck with that.”

There’s a moment then when Adalind’s whole life passes behind her eyes. Birth, Mom, Dad, homeschool, her mother’s downward spiral, the sweet relief of law school where at least the torture was her own to choose, and finally her futile and inglorious death, occasioned by the testosterone-poisoned tongue of a depowered Grimm feeling some kind of way about the one time they fucked really, really well under the cover of the stars.

It was nice while it lasted.

Sean looks absolutely murderous, but Nick just grins.

“Let me walk you to your door,” he says, pushing her forward with his warm, steady hand. “See you at the office, Captain.”

***

“What the fuck was that?”

They’re inside now, and Nick is picking up cushions from where Monroe had made a comfortable nest for Hank last night. Adalind is still standing at the front door—glaring at him with her hands on her hips—waiting for him to leave.

“What was what?” Nick says, like he didn’t just taunt a Royal prince about his proficiency or lack thereof in bed.

Adalind takes in a deep, seething breath and releases it slowly. If her powers and her future weren’t dependent on this man, she’d kill him right now and be done with the whole sordid affair.

“Nick, I’m not your girlfriend. Even if I were your girlfriend, you wouldn’t get to taunt my exes about how good we were in bed.”

He looks up sharply from fluffing the throw pillows and grins. “So you do admit that we were good?”

Adalind rolls her eyes. “Is that what this is about? Yes, I was there, too. It was good. Are you happy now?”

“Ecstatic,” Nick says. He’s closer now—a lot closer. Right in front of her and leaning in. How does this keep happening to them?

“Last night you said it was lousy,” he says. “I thought I might have to remind you just how wrong that assessment was.”

She’s already swaying towards him, pulled in by the heat and the laughter in his gaze. It’d be so easy to fall—to close the gap—to tear his clothes off and make it end. They wouldn’t have to talk then—wouldn’t have to decide. They’d fall into bed and that would be it. The baby would come in nine months, along with their powers, and if they were really lucky, maybe they’d never have to talk to each other again for the next eighteen years.

Only that’s not how parenting works. That much she knows. She doesn’t have a great sense of what good co-parenting looks like, but she’s pretty sure that it starts with said parents being on speaking terms. And if that’s the goal—if they are going to raise a child together—then they can’t start like this. Caught between her ex and the lurking shadow of Juliette. Propelled forward by the raw attraction between them—the magical drive towards creation that’s been haunting them since the ruins. Hot sex is not enough to build a life together on. It’s barely enough to build a conversation.

“Nick,” she says, practically whispering into his lips, “we can’t. Not today. Not before we’re sure.”

“Yeah,” he says, watching her lips and sighing a little. “I know.”

The front door opens then—not three feet behind her—and when Adalind finally rips her eyes away from Nick, there stands her mother—the Ice Queen of Portland—immaculately dressed in exquisite black.

“Oh,” she says, “you have company. Don’t let me stop you, dear. Feel free to finish your little tête-à-tête. It’s not like I haven’t been up waiting for you all night.”


	7. Chapter 7

Pound for pound, Mama Schade is the most terrifying hexenbiest Nick has ever met. She doesn’t crackle with power the way Henrietta does, and she doesn’t make him worry for his physical safety the way only Adalind could, but he looks into her cold, calculating eyes and knows that if any one of them was going to dissect him and strip mine him for all that he’s worth, it would be Mama Schade. She probably wouldn’t even chip her manicure while doing it.

“Mom!” Adalind says, clearly surprised by her mother’s arrival, and her eyes fly back to him. “Um…”

Whatever her checkered romantic past, Adalind doesn’t seem to be used to introducing her mother to men. Nick doesn’t blame her. If he had a mother like that, he’d be tempted to wait until his wedding day before introducing her to anyone.

Still, they’re all stuck here now, and Mama Schade is blocking the door, so Nick puts on his best door-to-door smile and pretends he’s here to interview her as a witness to a brutal murder. One she probably committed.

“Hi,” he says, holding out his hand to shake. “I’m Nick Burkhardt.”

Adalind groans beside him, face in her palms, while her mother ignores his hand and turns her laser beam gaze to her daughter.

“The Grimm?” she says. “You’re throwing over a Royal Prince for a Grimm?”

“It’s not like that,” Adalind says.

“I don’t care what it’s like. I raised you to be a Queen, not some Grimm’s whore.”

It's not his problem. It's not. He has to go home and talk to Juliette. That's his problem. His responsibility. He should really leave right now.

But Adalind's just standing there with her head bowed, shoulders slumped, and Nick can't think of a single time he's ever seen her back down from a fight. Not even back down. Shut down. She's completely catatonic, and for some reason, he just can't bear it.

“Okay,” Nick says, stepping between Adalind and her mother, “that’s more than enough of that. Let’s maybe not use the W-word before nine o’clock in the morning—”

“Nick, it’s all right,” Adalind says, her small hand running up his arm, trailing warmth while it comes to squeeze his bicep tightly.

“No, it’s not.” Nick says. “We had one hell of a night and the last thing any of us need is your mother freaking out because you suddenly have a better taste in men. Because let me tell you, Mama Schade, that Prince is an asshole.”

There’s a beat of silence, and then Adalind starts laughing and her mother blinks.

“Catherine,” she says, “my name is Catherine Schade. And of course he’s an asshole. He’s a Prince. That’s how they’re made.”

Adalind’s leaning into him now, laughing into his shoulder, all the tension draining out of her in soft peals of laughter that are starting to sound a lot like tears. He wraps an arm around her and pulls her in until she’s sobbing into his neck, hot tears against his skin.

“Great,” Nick says, “so you know he’s an asshole. Why do you want that for your daughter?”

“Well, he wouldn’t marry me,” Catherine says, like it’s the most normal thing in the world. “And Queen Mother has such a nice ring.”

“Wow,” he says, feeling Adalind tense in his arms, and then she’s up again and fighting.

“You slept with Sean?!”

Catherine rolls her eyes. “He’s a Prince. Of course I slept with him. And you’re going to go back to sleeping with him if you know what’s good for you. I told you, it’s a crown or nothing.”

Adalind looks like she’s about to be sick, and Nick makes a split second decision that he hopes he won’t come to regret.

“All right,” he says, “we’re leaving. Adalind, pack a change of clothes. This place is cursed, and I don’t want to leave you anywhere your mother has access to.”

Adalind looks like she’s about to protest, and then she swallows and shrugs.

“I never liked this place anyway,” she says. “Mom, I hope you and Sean are very happy together.”

***

Back in the car, Nick just drives for a while, waiting for inspiration to strike. He has no regrets about whisking away Adalind, but now he doesn’t know what to do with her. He can’t imagine Monroe will be too happy to find an unaccompanied former-hexenbiest back under his roof and the only other option…

The only other option is his home with Juliette, which he finds himself pulling up in front of by accident.

“Your house?” Adalind asks.

“Yeah,” he says, “sorry, autopilot.”

“It’s okay. At least my mother won’t come anywhere near here.”

“Do you want to come in?”

She tilts her head towards him. “Do you want me to? Isn’t that going to sort of cramp your style with Juliette?”

“Yeah,” he says with a short laugh, “probably. But I don’t know what else to do. Is there somewhere else you would rather go?”

It’s her turn to laugh—short and bitter. “No,” she says, ”there really, really isn’t.”

So they get out of the car and climb the walk to the house. The door opens before they get there, and there’s Juliette—pristine and lovely and everything he ever thought he wanted in a partner. Except he’s spent the last twelve hours running around Portland with his worst enemy, and somehow he thinks he wouldn’t have preferred to do that with anyone else.

“Oh my god,” Juliette says, reaching out to stroke his broken lip. “What happened to you?”

“Bad case,” he says, flinching away from her touch. It’s not the lip that makes him flinch; the press of her skin makes his spark and twitch with pain.

“You remember Adalind?” he says, stepping back, shoulder to shoulder with Adalind, who looks up at him with a flicker of concern and then quickly away again, back to Juliette.

“Of course,” Juliette says, getting a look at Adalind’s own busted lip. “You poor thing. Were you attacked?”

“Yes,” Adalind says, putting on her very best doe eyes. “Hank and I didn’t really work out, but there was this guy, and then Nick saved me, and just...it's been quite a night.”

“It sounds like it,” Juliette says. “Come in, come in. Can I get you some tea? Coffee? Hot chocolate?”

“She’s fine,” Nick says at the same time Adalind drops the doe eyes and says, “I could absolutely murder a cup of tea,” and Juliette just stares at both of them staring at each other in the foyer, trying to figure out their next move.

“So, tea,” Juliette says. “One cup of tea, coming right up.”

She disappears into the kitchen and both he and Adalind deflate, relaxing in the relief of her absence. Nick doesn’t want to feel like that about Juliette—like being around her is a strain—but today he can’t bear to meet her eyes. He’s afraid she’ll look at him and know—that he slept with Adalind, that he might do it again, that he’s not really Juliette’s now. Not completely. Not anymore.

“Nice place,” Adalind says, looking around at all of Juliette’s carefully chosen décor and the photos of him and Juliette looking happy and settled propped up around the place. He knows the photos aren’t that old, but this morning the guy in them seems very young. Nick’s not even sure he remembers what that felt like—to be fresh out of uniform and so very in love. He hasn’t felt anything like that—not since he became a Grimm. Not since he looked up one day and saw Adalind’s face in the sun.

He looks to Adalind standing in this carefully curated house with her leather jacket and her wild eyes and her busted lip, dented by his teeth marks—his own dented by hers—and he thinks he’s never seen another woman like her. That’s probably a good thing, all considered, but still. She’s unique. He might not even regret meeting her. Not anymore.

There’s something about this house today that doesn’t feel right. None of this furniture is his after all. When he moved in with Juliette all of his had been made of particle board—all falling apart after years of moving from lease to lease. It’d make sense to ditch all of his stuff, and he doesn’t miss it. There was nothing to miss. But maybe he misses the idea of having his own stuff. His own taste. The idea of really feeling centered in a space that speaks to him—that he feels like he can be himself in. He spends most of his time in this house keeping it the way Juliette likes it, and that was absolutely fine until Adalind walked in today, and suddenly he’s not sure he can stand it.

“Nick?” Juliette’s calling him from the kitchen, and he sighs and leads Adalind that way with a tilt of his head.

Juliette is bustling around the kitchen—pulling her mugs out of her cabinets. Pulling her tea bags out of her canisters. She’s so grounded here—so at home—and somehow, he just isn’t. It’s a depressing thought, but there it is. He has more pressing concerns to focus on right now, anyway.

“I’m sorry for the short notice,” he tells Juliette, “but Adalind’s home isn’t really safe right now. I was wondering if she could stay here for a night or two? Just until we figure out what to do next.”

“Sure,” Juliette says, smiling warmly at Adalind in a way that makes Nick a little nauseous. Even Adalind looks a shade paler, which is really saying something. It’s the first time he’s ever thought that Juliette might be taking her whole nice girl thing just a little too far. It seems so wrong that he can bring a strange, beautiful woman into Juliette’s home with the flimsiest of cover stories and have Juliette welcome her with open arms and not the slightest whiff of suspicion. It’s even worse that she has every reason to be suspicious. Not that he’s planning on cheating on her again anytime soon—or at all if he can help it—but if the last twenty-four hours have taught him anything, it’s that none of his plans are worth jack shit.

“Do you want to take a shower, Adalind?” Juliette offers, all sweetness and light, “or do you want tea first? It’s completely up to you.”

Adalind stares at Juliette, and Nick wonders if she’s thinking the same thing. That she probably smells like pine needles and blood and _him_ —the same way he probably smells like her. Something spiced and marshmallowy. Good enough to eat.

“A shower would be great,” Adalind says, at the same time he says, “I should probably shower, too,” and then they’re right back where they started, staring at each other while Juliette stares at them, and Nick has no idea how they’re ever going to make it through the morning, much less the next few nights.


End file.
